Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie (5 page)

But his enthusiasm got more frenzied and his songs and career turned into a battle between his talent and his manic depression. When he sang, ‘I had lost my mind / You see I had this tiny
crack in my head that slowly split open / And my brains oozed out / Lying in the sidewalk / And I didn’t even know it,’ he meant it. A film about him, Jeff Feuerzeig’s
The
Devil and Daniel Johnston
, is the best documentary about mental illness I have ever seen. It captures how he grew increasingly delusional during the late 1980s, repeating phrases such as
‘Kick Satan out’ over and over, talking too fast, like he was a passenger in his own thought process.

An uneasy relationship formed between him and his audiences. The crowd would look at each other for clues to how they should respond, what they should think, whether they should like him or not.
The moment in the documentary that stayed with me most powerfully was an interview with Daniel’s friend Louis Black, the editor of the alternative magazine the
Austin Chronicle
. He
once found Daniel standing knee-deep in a river on the University of Austin campus, preaching loudly into the night about Satan.

‘We spend our lives with the notion of the crazy artist,’ Louis Black said, ‘Van Gogh cutting off his ear, and we really loved the crazy people because they were our people.
They didn’t have any commercial sense. And yet here was a real sick person. And we were, “What are we going to do?” So we did the most pedestrian thing possible. We committed him.
I’ve always had contempt for those people who didn’t understand genius. And here I am, saying, “Please put him in this hospital.” Because we didn’t know what to
do.’

The Devil and Daniel Johnston
is a tribute not only to Johnston and his music, but to his friends and especially his parents, Mabel and Bill, who have spent a lifetime doing their best in
the midst of unbearable stress.

Then there was Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, who ruled over his band with a tyrannical fury. For his album
Trout Mask Replica
he rented a house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, and
forced his musicians to eat only a cup of soya beans a day. For eight months they weren’t allowed to leave the house at all, except for once a week when one of them was permitted to briefly
go and get groceries. He would psychologically break his drummer and bass player down by yelling repeatedly in their faces, ‘You hate your mother!’ for thirty-hour stretches.

Peter, Lenny and I rented a disused railway station for a while just outside the Alton Towers theme park, near Stoke, so we could write. It was there Peter told me a haunting story about a band
called The Shaggs. It was a story he only half-remembered from something he’d read years before, but it was so strange I felt compelled to fly to The Shaggs’ home town, Fremont, New
Hampshire, to try and meet them.

***

Nowadays Dot Wiggin is a cleaner in her local church. You wouldn’t know from meeting her or her sister Betty that they once recorded about the strangest record ever
made.

Betty Wiggin, Jon Ronson, Dot Wiggin.

Fremont looked as gentle and as unassuming as they did. The main display in the Historical Museum commemorated how Fremont was the first place in the world where a B52 bomber had crashed but
nobody was killed. ‘B52 bombers had crashed elsewhere,’ Matthew Thomas, the town historian, told me when I’d visited the museum the night before, ‘but people had died. In
Fremont, nobody died. That’s what made Fremont pretty unique with that episode.’

I took a walk with Dot and Betty to their house. Or the place where it used to be before the new owners burnt it to the ground so they could build a new house further up the land. The grass had
never grown back so you could still see the outline – the ghost of a house. It was there they told me their story.

When Dot and Betty were children there was no music in their lives. No music and no friends outside the family. Their father Austin wouldn’t allow it. ‘We couldn’t go to dances
or anything,’ Dot told me. ‘We just stayed home. He didn’t want us to have a social life. He was afraid we’d get too involved on the outside.’

‘Which we would have,’ Betty said.

Given his devout bearing, the announcement he made over dinner one night sometime during the mid-1960s came very much out of the blue. He told his daughters that he’d just returned from
his mother’s house where she’d read his palm and divined from it that the sisters were going to be in one of the most successful girl groups in America. He was therefore taking them out
of school so they could practise. Relentlessly. From morning until night. Until they were ready.

‘We practised during the day when he worked,’ Dot told me, ‘and then when he came home from work we practised. We practised until he liked it. If he didn’t like it we
practised over and over. Usually on Saturdays too.’

‘Did he ever ask you if you wanted to do it?’ I asked.

‘No!’ Dot and Betty laughed.

‘Did you sometimes think your father was nuts?’ I asked.

There was a short silence. ‘Yeah, that would fit it,’ Betty said.

‘Obsessive,’ said Dot. ‘Very obsessive with the music.’ And with exercises too: ‘Jumping-jacks,’ said Dot. ‘Push-ups. We had to stay in shape in case we
ever got to be on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.’

‘When you think back on those rehearsals, what comes into your mind?’ I asked.

‘That I didn’t want to do it,’ said Betty.

It lasted five years. And then, just as suddenly as Austin had announced the strategy, he one day declared them ready.

‘We didn’t think we were ready,’ Dot told me.

Still, they drove to the recording studio – a girl group of Kaspar Hausers, out in the countryside, home-schooled, separated from society, pretty much inventing music from scratch. If
you’ve heard practically no music and then you’re told to create music, what would it sound like?

It sounded, as Bonnie Raitt said of them decades later, like music performed by ‘castaways on their own musical desert island’. The singer in the band NRBQ, Terry Adams, later
described them to me as having ‘a different rhythmic approach, which acknowledges what’s going on but ignores it at the same time. There are no harmonies. It’s always unison
singing. Two voices and one guitar playing exactly the same melody at all times.’

‘Is that unusual?’ I asked him.

‘Very,’ he said.

Their music is of course available online. I suggest the song ‘Philosophy of the World’ as a starting point. It sounds like space aliens pretending to be human. It sounds, too, I now
realized, like the music of abuse. And the cruelty only spread once the album came out and Austin forced his daughters to be the house band at the local dances.

‘We’d have soda cans shot at us on stage,’ Dot said, ‘kids telling us how bad we were, how our music was trash, how it hurt their ears, how we didn’t know what we
were doing . . .’

But the music wasn’t trash – it was something altogether different. They were doing it against their will, they weren’t very good, they massively over-rehearsed, they had no
musical influences – it was like a child throwing a bunch of chemicals randomly into a Bunsen burner and the strangest bubbles ensuing.

In 1975 Austin dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. The instant the sisters heard the news they disbanded The Shaggs, determined never to play again.

And they never would have – their music would have been lost for ever – except that Terry Adams somehow came across a copy of
Philosophy of the World
some twenty years later,
was mesmerized by what he heard, and decided to drive to Fremont to try and convince them to let him re-release it.

‘My brother and my drummer and I got in the car and took a six-hour drive, just blindly,’ Terry Adams told me when I later contacted him. ‘We went to the library and asked
around until we could find them.’

Eventually Dot and her then husband Fred agreed to a rendezvous at a local Pizza Hut. Terry and his brother and the band’s drummer sat on one side of the table, with Dot and Fred on the
other. Terry nervously gave them his pitch. Dot and Fred listened. And finally, when he was done, Fred leaned forward, businessman to businessman, and said, ‘Well how much is this going to
cost us?’

There was a silence. ‘No,’ Terry explained. ‘
We’re
going to pay
you
.’

Betty didn’t want anything to do with it. It was all just too painful. But then, when Terry Adams released the album and the reviews came in, even she began to doubt her
own inabilities. Kurt Cobain, in his list of fifty favourite albums of all time, put
Philosophy of the World
at number five (just below the Pixies and Iggy and the Stooges and above the Sex
Pistols and R.E.M.).

Jonathan Richman said one Shaggs song was ‘worth ten “professional” songs. The Shaggs convince me that they’re the real thing when they sing.’ The jazz composer
Carla Bley said, ‘They bring my mind to a complete halt.’ Nothing much happened after that. The album sold pretty well. They performed one or two shows. Susan Orlean wrote about them
for the
New Yorker
. A stage musical –
Philosophy of the World
– was written and performed in New York and Los Angeles. Their film rights were bought, although no film has
yet been made. I turned my meeting with them into a documentary for BBC Radio Four. But, basically, it was a just flurry and everything went back to normal for Dot and Betty.

‘When did you first listen to
Philosophy of the World
and think, “This is actually quite good?” ’ I asked Betty towards the end of my day with them.

She looked at me and hesitated. ‘I still don’t think it’s good,’ she said.

No trace of The Shaggs’ story made it to our Frank film, but something did: for all our mythologizing, the margins can be painful and some people are there because they
have no choice.

***

A week after I returned from Fremont, I saw Frank Sidebottom’s name trending on Twitter. I’d spent a couple of years living with the words Frank Sidebottom every
day, so this didn’t seem at all odd. It was just his name on a screen like every day. I clicked on the link and it said ‘Frank Sidebottom dead’. I wondered why Chris had decided
to kill off Frank and why Twitter cared enough to make it a trending topic. So I clicked on another link:

Stars lead tributes as Frank Sidebottom comic dies at 54

Chris Sievey, famous as his alter ego Frank Sidebottom, was found collapsed at his home in Hale early yesterday. It is understood that his girlfriend called an ambulance and he
was taken to Wythenshawe Hospital, where his death was confirmed.

Manchester Evening News
, 22 June 2010

When I’d told Chris at our last meeting in Kentish Town how thin he looked and he shrugged and said it was a mystery and he seemed pleased – he didn’t know it then, but it had
been throat cancer.

Frank Sidebottom comic faces pauper’s funeral

The comic genius behind Mancunian legend Frank Sidebottom is facing a pauper’s funeral after dying virtually penniless. Chris Sievey had no assets and little money in the
bank, his family have revealed.

Manchester Evening News
, 23 June 2010

A pauper’s funeral? What did that involve? A journey back in time two hundred years? Later, Chris’s son Sterling told me that the hospital bereavement officer had described a
pauper’s funeral to him as ‘not as bad as it sounded. There’d be a coffin but it wouldn’t be coffin shaped. It would be more like a rectangular box. Like a cargo crate or
something.’

‘What about a service?’ I asked Sterling.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No real service. And there wouldn’t have been a gravestone.’

I sent out a single tweet, saying that for a few thousand pounds Chris could be spared a pauper’s funeral. Within an hour 554 people had donated £6,950.03. An hour
later it was 1,108 donors and £14,018.90. By the end of the day it was 1,632 donors raising a total of £21,631.55. One blogger wrote of the donors: ‘I found the speed of events
breathtaking, and genuinely inspiring that so many people could reach into their pockets in tribute to a man who many won’t have met, spoken to, or even seen his face. It’s nice to know
there are so many kind-hearted people out there & wonderful to see another example of how social networks can be used in a positive, inspirational way.’

The money we raised that day was more than enough to bury and exhume and rebury Chris half a dozen times. The donations never stopped. We had to stop them. People still wanted to give but there
was nothing to give for.

A Timperley village councillor, Neil Taylor, started his own campaign to raise money for a memorial statue – Frank cast in bronze. He sent me photographs of its journey from the foundry in
the Czech Republic to its final resting place outside Johnson’s the dry cleaners in Timperley. In the photographs Frank looked like he’d been disturbingly kidnapped but was fine with
it.